Diebold and Corrupt Elections

"Two weeks ago, an obscure, unelected, Republican-appointed official in California decided the future of the world. That future -- at least for the next several years -- will be an accelerating nightmare of war, corruption, repression, atrocity and terror. That's because the loyal apparatchik has, with the stroke of a pen, guaranteed the perpetuation of the Bush faction in power in 2008 and beyond."

Thus begins an article from the Moscow Times, that explains how Califonia, a crucial state in national elections, is now subject to the will of whoever controls those completely insecure Diebold voting machines. The people controlling them are the Republicans, who've been pushing their use throughout the country, even though they've never proved to be anything less than a tool for anyone to falsify elections. It means no votes counted on these machines can ever be trusted.

"After Diebold's machines failed miserably in a battery of tests last year, McPherson vowed to put their certification on hold until his own hand-picked panel of experts had fine-combed the system to a fare-thee-well, blogger Brad Friedman reports. The panel delivered their conclusions last month -- and the results were staggering, far beyond the worst fears of the most hard-core "conspiracy theorist." The panel found that Diebold's machines were riddled with curious built-in glitches that effectively "ceded complete control of the system" to hackers who could "change vote totals, modify reports, change the names of candidates and change the races being voted on."

"What's more, "hackers wouldn't need to know passwords or cryptographic keys, or have access to any other part of the system to do their dirty work," the Los Angeles Times notes. "Voters, candidates and election monitors wouldn't necessarily know they'd been rooked." A more perfect vehicle for fixing an election can hardly be imagined. And it would require nothing more than a handful of high-tech zealots, not a vast conspiracy."

The damnedest thing is that this isn't new information. We've known since they first appeared that those machines were hackable, yet they've still been pushed into use. It looks to me like our election system is now nothing more than an illusion that will continue to exist, only as a pretext to legitimacy. With these machines, it will no longer matter who gets the majority of votes, since those already in power will just rig the machines to give pre-defined results.